百田 尚樹

Every once in a while a book comes along that is not what I would usually choose to read, and I end up being captivated by it. This is one. The novel reads like oral history from a series of very old men looking back on their war experiences. Their personal stories interweave and repeat and support one another and they also allow the author to explore many points of view about the militarism of Japan, the wastefulness of war, and the nature of heroism.

There is so much detail here that is historically accurate and heartbreaking. Author Hyakuta is apparently a nationalist who denies the rape of Nanking but the novel itself is complicated and nuanced. The prose is workmanlike but totally works in context, given that most of the story is told by old men who were conscripted or volunteered for the military before completing high school. There is so much detail about the history of the aerial combat in the Pacific arena that I never thought about before, and yet found fascinating.

For example there is a conversation between a mechanic and a pilot where they mutually come to the realization that, even though the Zero is superior to any American plane at the time of their conversation, the industrial tools to make the Zero engines are all made in America, and so there will be no way to improve the design, and the planes themselves will be manufactured with increasingly worn manufacturing equipment.

And indeed by 1943 the US had developed a new plane to surpass the Zero, because of Japan's lack of access to new materials and equipment.

Also: Many of the men's remembrances praise the Zero for its ability to travel long distances over the Pacific, a huge advantage in the beginning of the war...but then they share stories of how this strength in the Zero led to overconfidence, and to increasingly long missions, where pilots regularly would run out of fuel and fall into the sea on the way back to base.

There are many details like this that allowed me to understand, better than before, the interconnectedness of culture, economics, geography, and the decisions of individual human beings, and how all these things worked together to determine the war's outcome.

In some cases the novel troubled me. In some cases I felt pulled in uncomfortable directions, or in need of doing research myself on what was being presented to me as fact (although the book is fiction, what is presented here is clearly meant to be taken as true). I've yet to research the claim made many times in the novel that the Japanese had meant to declare war before the Pearl Harbor attack but that a communications snafu led instead to the undeserved reputation that the Japanese had made a "sneak attack." But maybe because of these questions, more than in spite of them, I thought this novel was extraordinary.… (meer)

Kentaro, 26 ans, est un étudiant lymphatique peu motivé par le travail et la vie active. A la demande de Keiko, sa sœur, jeune écrivain freelance, le jeune homme se plonge dans son passé familial. Kyuzo Miyabe, son grand-père, fut en effet un pilote de chasse de la marine impériale japonaise et il combattit principalement en tenant les commandes du mythique chasseur japonais : le « Zero ». Ce sera juste à la fin de la guerre qu'il mourra en kamikaze. Fut-il le héros que tout le monde prétend ? Ou plutôt un terroriste ? Un lâche ? Lui qui n’a pas pu tenir la promesse qu’il avait faite à sa femme... Au fil des volumes, Kentaro découvre à travers des rencontres et des témoignages qui fut véritablement son grand-père, ce qui le plongera dans une profonde quête identitaire et historique.

Une série en 5 volumes. Bien écrit, bon déroulement, personnages attachants. À la fin du volume 1 il y a une petite historique des kamikazes et des avions de guerre le Mitsubishi A6M 1940 ou `zéro`.… (meer)